Re: unterminated character constant error

[Tobias Burnus <burnus at net-b dot de>]

Kamaraju S Kusumanchi wrote:
> This has recently been brought up on Debian mailing list while making a
> transition from g77 to gfortran of libhdf4 package. I am not very familiar
> with F77, so I thought I would ask here if this is a bug in gfortran.
>
> Consider the attached code (test case is reduced as much as possible)
>
> $g77 -c test_file.f
>
> $gfortran -c test_file.f
> test_file.f:4.20:
>
>            print *, 'Try one of "Skip", "Test", "Verbosity" or "Cleanup"
>                    1
> Error: Unterminated character constant beginning at (1)
>   

In such cases it helps to use -Wall; the last warning is the important one,

$ gfortran -Wall aaa.f
Warning: Nonconforming tab character in column 1 of line 1
Warning: Nonconforming tab character in column 1 of line 2
Warning: Nonconforming tab character in column 1 of line 3
Warning: Nonconforming tab character in column 1 of line 4
Warning: Nonconforming tab character in column 1 of line 6
aaa.f:4.20:

           print *, 'Try one of "Skip", "Test", "Verbosity" or "Cleanup"
                   1
Error: Unterminated character constant beginning at (1)
aaa.f:4.72:

           print *, 'Try one of "Skip", "Test", "Verbosity" or "Cleanup"
                                                                       1
Warning: Line truncated at (1)

Fixed-form Fortran has only 72 characters per line. What happens with
longer lines is implementation dependent. However, many
programmers/programs assume that everything after column 72 is ignored
(which gfortran does).

Solution: Fix the program by splitting the line or by using the 
-ffixed-line-length-n (n is a non-negative integer).

For that example program I would simply remove the space in "*, 'Try".

Tobias